World (Non-US) General Politics/Events Discussion

Because the US thread has, despite all odds, turned out successful (at least in my eyes), I decided to give non-US BM fans a chance to voice their approval/grievances with their own countries. Also because I like to know what goes on in the world and if it's half as crazy as what happens here. If you're a US BM fan feel free to post here as well if you have questions or just things you find interesting about other countries I suppose. Oh and don't be an asshole.

I've been clicking on the US thread with some trepidation lately. But I'm excited to read this one! When I visited family in Germany last year it was embarrassing how much they knew about our state of affairs (and had so many questions about Trump), compared to what we knew was going on in their politics. I try to keep up with the world but our news doesn't talk about much else.

Always good to have a global perspective on what is going on. Will be really interested to see what gets posted here, hopefully it doesn't get as "personal". Interested in hearing from the international issues/events that we may not hear about in the states.

Since I'm in IT the big news today of the ransomware attack was a hot topic. This probably affected our U.K. Members more, but last I saw it was 55k+ systems and something like 74+ countries. It goes to show just how far much of our corporate infrastructure is well behind the times.

I've been clicking on the US thread with some trepidation lately. But I'm excited to read this one! When I visited family in Germany last year it was embarrassing how much they knew about our state of affairs (and had so many questions about Trump), compared to what we knew was going on in their politics. I try to keep up with the world but our news doesn't talk about much else.

Most Americans do not focus on international politics indeed. I follow Canadian politics just because I used to drive trucks to Canada and listen to CKNW talk radio (a Vancouver talk station) oddly enough the current premier of BC, Christy Clark, was a CKNW talk show host

I feel like other countries watch US events because they know events here could affect them but we tend to ignore other countries even though logically if like China had a huge economic upheaval that would certainly affect us.

@trippyI'm sure India has its own share of problems but they also manage to consistently have just frankly nonsensical things happen on a weekly basis and it always amuses me. Like back in November they just banned 80% of all Indian currency to stop corruption. Like the equivalent of banning the $5 and $20 to stop drug dealers from getting cash so easily.

I've been clicking on the US thread with some trepidation lately. But I'm excited to read this one! When I visited family in Germany last year it was embarrassing how much they knew about our state of affairs (and had so many questions about Trump), compared to what we knew was going on in their politics. I try to keep up with the world but our news doesn't talk about much else.

Most Americans do not focus on international politics indeed. I follow Canadian politics just because I used to drive trucks to Canada and listen to CKNW talk radio (a Vancouver talk station) oddly enough the current premier of BC, Christy Clark, was a CKNW talk show host

I've been clicking on the US thread with some trepidation lately. But I'm excited to read this one! When I visited family in Germany last year it was embarrassing how much they knew about our state of affairs (and had so many questions about Trump), compared to what we knew was going on in their politics. I try to keep up with the world but our news doesn't talk about much else.

Most Americans do not focus on international politics indeed. I follow Canadian politics just because I used to drive trucks to Canada and listen to CKNW talk radio (a Vancouver talk station) oddly enough the current premier of BC, Christy Clark, was a CKNW talk show host

Yeah we also get CBC here.

Which station if you don't mind my asking? I have good friend in the service who's stationed in port Angeles, I visit him on weekends and I can tune 90.5 FM (Victoria's CBC station) when I get over the hood canal bridge but I've never been able to get it in Seattle or on the I-5 corridor. Hell I can barely get it when I go to Vancouver

I follow the Times of India on Facebook and a couple of other pages that talk about Indian news- most of the techs for one of my software vendors are Indian and I'm interested both on just a pure curiosity level and because India is this emerging economy that I think Americans should pay more attention to. I can't claim understanding anything about their politics in depth because I mostly just read headlines and then get sucked into the comments because they are so damn amusing. Their particular style of speaking English mixed with Internet insults just cracks me up. The best was one time when a Times of India commenter told another one "you have ten fathers" LOL

Indian politics, from the little I understand about it, seems very convoluted and dramatic, though, and their Prime Minister Modi has a certain sartorial flair. He even once wore a jacket with his name embroidered in the pinstripes to a meeting with Obama, which a lot of the Indian commenters seemed to consider extremely embarrassing lol

I feel like other countries watch US events because they know events here could affect them but we tend to ignore other countries even though logically if like China had a huge economic upheaval that would certainly affect us.

I think it's partly that and partly because the US tends to dominate the media and social media to the point where it saturates the coverage in other nations. It helps that many folks throughout the world speak English whereas Americans as a whole don't bother to learn other languages. :P

I do hear bits and pieces here and there of other countries because I have a lot of Facebook friends based on my hobbies (mainly my history in cat rescue and my current crochet hobby) and they are all around the US and the world. I also get to see and hear what they think of American news a lot. I have a Finnish Facebook crochet friend that I chat with and she said people there were worried that Trump would collude with Putin and/or look the other way if Putin tried some aggression toward Finland (which is a very rational fear if you know their history). What's interesting about this was they had this fear last fall before a lot of this Russia-Trump stuff was big news. I have a little group of Mexican friends who live just south of the border and they said on election night their feeds were full of memes saying something like "everyone go to bed early tonight, we need to wake up early and get to work on the wall" LOL. It's also fun to see their political memes about their own government since Mexicans don't trust their government at all and they also have a fairly intense and non-PC sense of humor (even my friends who are liberal, college educated women).

I feel like other countries watch US events because they know events here could affect them but we tend to ignore other countries even though logically if like China had a huge economic upheaval that would certainly affect us.

others countries watch the US because the world economy is based around the american dollar. Thats why if China was manipulating currency it would mess with our economy greatly, but China is probably the nation that could effect the US, technically the Euro if manipulated enough could effect us, but the whole EU would have to be involved.

I'm fairly interested to see how Brexit impacts the non-Britain parts of the U.K. considering North Ireland and Scotland voters preferred to remain in the E.U., I doubt that they'll just immediately declare independence but certainly if over time they're more negatively impacted by the decision than say Britain or Wales I could see a very serious effort to leave the U.K. gaining ground over the next few years.

I'm fairly interested to see how Brexit impacts the non-Britain parts of the U.K. considering North Ireland and Scotland voters preferred to remain in the E.U., I doubt that they'll just immediately declare independence but certainly if over time they're more negatively impacted by the decision than say Britain or Wales I could see a very serious effort to leave the U.K. gaining ground over the next few years.

I'd venture to guess that Scottish independence is all but assured now. They narrowly voted to remain during the last referendum and now with Brexit (which Scotland overwhelming voted against) it's just sort of certain that Scotland will separate under the next referendum.

There was some not so serious discussion about Scotland joining Canada, and previously there was talks of Iceland joining Canada too (they proposed switching their currency to the Canadian dollar) and every few years the idea of the Turks and Caicos Islands joining us comes up. Everyone wants to join us...except our own Province of Quebec haha!

I follow the Times of India on Facebook and a couple of other pages that talk about Indian news- most of the techs for one of my software vendors are Indian and I'm interested both on just a pure curiosity level and because India is this emerging economy that I think Americans should pay more attention to. I can't claim understanding anything about their politics in depth because I mostly just read headlines and then get sucked into the comments because they are so damn amusing. Their particular style of speaking English mixed with Internet insults just cracks me up. The best was one time when a Times of India commenter told another one "you have ten fathers" LOL

Indian politics, from the little I understand about it, seems very convoluted and dramatic, though, and their Prime Minister Modi has a certain sartorial flair. He even once wore a jacket with his name embroidered in the pinstripes to a meeting with Obama, which a lot of the Indian commenters seemed to consider extremely embarrassing lol

I'm fairly interested to see how Brexit impacts the non-Britain parts of the U.K. considering North Ireland and Scotland voters preferred to remain in the E.U., I doubt that they'll just immediately declare independence but certainly if over time they're more negatively impacted by the decision than say Britain or Wales I could see a very serious effort to leave the U.K. gaining ground over the next few years.

I'm fairly interested to see how Brexit impacts the non-Britain parts of the U.K. considering North Ireland and Scotland voters preferred to remain in the E.U., I doubt that they'll just immediately declare independence but certainly if over time they're more negatively impacted by the decision than say Britain or Wales I could see a very serious effort to leave the U.K. gaining ground over the next few years.

As a big exporter though that might not be a good thing. Which is one of the reasons the Euro is so important to Europe. It saves thousands of German manufacturers.

A New York non-profit is currently testing basic universal income in a village in Kenya. I feel like this a good time to start testing this idea since it may become necessary in a more machine driven work system.

@DeeI'm actually really curious about the election process in Australia. I read recently that Prime Minister position changes hands 23 times without even having a election? That seems crazy to me given that only 9 of our presidents didn't serve out a full term and 8 of those died in office but again I don't know much about how elections work there.

@Alkaid13 The party elects its leader. We elect our local member of parliament - so whichever team we want running the show, we vote for the person in our local area who represents that party (or for an independent if we want someone who can shake things up in parliament).

The party goes to the polls with whoever it has elected as leader but they can have a leadership spill at any time. It didn't really ever used to happen much while they were in government, generally a leader was only replaced if that party didn't win the election. In the last 10 years we have had a sitting PM removed and replaced with his deputy, who went to an election as the leader and resulted in a hung parliament (not enough seats to form government). She made deals with several independents to form government, but the opposition leader - who if rumours are true offered the world to the same indies to side with him (and is well known to be a very sore loser) - basically obstructed everything he possibly could to try to make her look ineffectual. So that combined with our country's horrific sexism combined to kill off her chances in the next election and her party ousted her and replaced her with the guy she had taken over from but no one wanted him back so they lost. Crazypants McGee's mob won, but he was incredibly unpopular with pretty much everyone, so after a couple of years they replaced him with another guy presumed to be more popular (spoiler - he's not). He's our current PM and everyone hates him.

In the meantime, after the election, the opposition leader who had replaced Julia Gillard got the arse and was replaced with yet another dude who is also not very popular and may or may not get booted before the next election. His election to the leadership by his party was extremely unpopular with the public, who vastly preferred the other candidate for the job. But, as I said, we don't get to choose.